Building a New Business Website, Part 2: Content is King

A business website does not have to be page after page of content. In fact, if you can limit the information on your company's website to what prospective clients and customers are looking for, you can improve your chances of selling your product or service. It's also important to make that information easy to find. Whether a prospect finds you through a search engine or one of your existing clients visits your website for a specific purpose, a well-organized site is much easier to navigate and understand.

Contact Information

Even if your target customer is web-savvy, it's crucial to provide your physical contact information on your website (business address, phone and fax number, email address, etc.), as well as additional ways to contact you on the Internet (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). It's become standard to make your contact information available on a page dedicated to that purpose - many visitors to your site will automatically look for a contact page if they run into difficulties.

You can also include tools so that clients can contact you through the website directly. Depending on the way your website is set up, you can add a contact form that allows your clients to email you from the web page. There are several benefits to such an approach, including the fact that such forms allow you to route email to different people within your company based on the information the user provides. For example, your form can have a built-in question that says "What department are you trying to reach?" If the option for "Billing" is selected, the message can be automatically routed to the email address of the billing specialist you assign.

Forms are becoming more popular than creating an email address for questions, because any email address published on the web will routinely receive large quantities of spam. Forms can limit the amount of spam you receive.

Products and Services

Many visitors to your website will simply be looking for information about the products and services your business offers. By listing descriptions of what you're selling, you can make it easier for a client to decide exactly what he or she wants to purchase. Many companies choose to list their prices and even make it possible to purchase those products and services online. Some do not, due to factors like sliding price scales - but if you can make the purchasing process easier by offering an online shopping cart, you can often increase sales. An online shopping cart is a tool that allows visitors to purchase your products or services through your website. While there are many options out there for shopping carts, some are harder to set up than others. One of the easiest to add to your website is available through PayPal. Simply fill in a form, providing information about your product to PayPal. PayPal then generates code that you add to the HTML of your website. You will instantly have a shopping cart that allows visitors to make purchases (either with their PayPal accounts or with a credit card) on your website.

If you offer a wide variety of products, creating an online catalog can simplify things for customers ready to make a purchase. There are numerous tools that have made building a catalog a relatively simple process. Where you once would have had to create individual entries by hand, there are many templates that allow you to create a catalog just by adding items on your website. Which catalog tool you use depends on how you've built your site. Many websites are now built on content management systems, which allow you to make changes to your without knowing much HTML. Each system has its own tools for creating catalogs. For example, if you're using Joomla, you could use JoomlaShopBuilder. With WordPress, you could use Shopp.

Business Information

In addition to the basics of how to get in touch with your company and what your company has available for sale, many clients and customers will want to know who you are and why your business is a better option than all of the alternatives. By creating a page within your website that tells a little about your business, you can help establish the fact that your business isn't just a website - there are real people behind it. You can include a wide variety of information, depending on what your company wants to share: testimonials, the story of how the business began and profiles of the people involved in the company are all options.

An informative website can be crucial for connecting with clients and customers and it can also help establish your site as a credible resource. When it comes to determining credibility - especially if you're asking them to send in a credit card number or other financial information through the website - the typical visitor will look for whether you've listed information that will allow him to contact you in person (a phone number or an address). He'll also look for more in-depth information that demonstrates you've been in business for a while. That can take different shapes, such as an award you've received from an outside organization or testimonials from past clients.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As you're adding content to your website, it's important to keep in mind that the most important sources of visitors for any website are search engines, like Google. In order to make sure that search engines can easily find your website and recommend it, it's important to use a few search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

• Use keywords that describe your products and services throughout your website.
• Link between the different pages of your website, so that both human visitors and search engine robots can easily navigate.
• Use descriptive anchor text when creating links.
• Get links to your site placed on other websites.

Adding a blog or otherwise regularly updating your website can be crucial to ranking well in search results. Many search engines consider regularly updated websites to be more useful to their visitors. Blogs also offer an opportunity to build more links to the different pages on your website, as well as getting links from websites outside your own.

Be wary of SEO specialists who promise to get you to the top of Google's search results in very short periods of time or promise to bring in thousands of visitors quickly. Many of these specialists will use tricks that work for only a short period of time - Google and other search engines change the criteria they use to rank results on a regular basis and relying on SEO tricks can quickly convince a search engine robot that your website shouldn't be listed at all. Relying on good content and connecting with other websites in your field are much better ways to convince the search engines that your website is legitimate.